The days that most women choose to stay at home to raise a family are long gone. Women in Missouri are fighting to take over the workplace, despite still only earning a median 77% of what their male counterparts make. In a bid to establish financial security, an increasing number of career-oriented women are putting off becoming mothers until they are in their 30s – and they are doing it with ease.
According to Ness Sandoval, assistant professor at St. Louis University, we could be seeing the last of a domino effect that was teamed with increased access to birth control and improved assisted reproductive technology to allow women to give birth at an older age when they are more financially secure and better prepared emotionally.
Early parenthood can hinder life earnings
Women have become more career-oriented over the past decade than they have ever been. According to research from Washington University in St. Louis, working women who want to curtail the income losses generally attributed to motherhood should wait until they are 30 years old before first starting a family. These findings are applicable regardless of whether a woman is in possession of a college degree or not. The research found that both college graduates and those without a degree had lower lifetime incomes when they first gave birth at 30 years of age or younger. The most affected group were those women without college degrees who gave birth before they were 25. It was further found that college-educated women who delayed motherhood till after their 30th birthday earned more over their entire career span than women who had no children at all.
Delayed parenthood on the rise
While it can hardly be described as a baby boom, the increased birth rate among women in their 30’s is counteracting a previous incline in births among women between the ages of 15 and 24. It has been noted that women who are intentionally avoiding early parenthood are more likely to fully embrace it when they are older when they have completed their education and have become financially secure after securing stable careers for themselves. Studies by the National Center for Health Statistics have shown that the number of births to women in their 30’s in Missouri has increased by as much as 17.3% while births in other age groups declined by 18.4%. The overall number of births in the state decreased from 81,930 in 2007 to 75,060 in 2015.
Mothers are not only older when they first give birth, they are also having their children more closely together than they did a decade ago. In 2000, there was an average gap of 2.8 years between first and second born children. This gap decreased to 2.4 years by 2014.
While delaying parenthood may be prevalent in Missouri, similar trends have been noted across the entire USA as women choose to only have children after completing their studies, becoming financially secure and even traveling the world. Regardless of why a woman chooses to have children later in life, the trend is seemingly here to stay and could turn out to be of great benefit not only to individual families but to the overall economy as well.